My Super Duper Top Secret Writing Project REVEALED

I have been tormenting some of you for a while now over my super duper top secret writing project since NaNoWriMo. I can finally reveal what I've been working on.

So... when I decided to do NaNoWriMo, I was in an interesting situation. I always do NaNoWriMo. And, because I feel like it's sort of a rebellious thing, I always try to write a weird book completely outside of my comfort zone that I don't entirely intend to publish but secretly hope it will become a bestseller. So far, no secret hope come true, but maybe someday, right?

This year, I entered NaNo season after talking with my 13 year old about books and how it was hard to find a book for her to read. So, being the slightly insane woman I am, I decided to take on the challenge for NaNo. Yes, friends, my secret book was a Young Adult. Let's be clear here- the book was solely written with my daughter's tastes in mind. Which means a ton of stuff blows up, there's a dragon, the heroine can totally kick anyone's butt, and there's a nod to her favorite character from TV. This also means that I have no idea if there's a market for it, or if it's even wise for me to try to sell a YA at this point in my career, so this book may never see the light of day. And I am perfectly okay with that.

I decided that this book would be my daughter's Christmas present. I wrote it, and I'll be honest, I LOVE THIS BOOK!! Which probably means it's total crap, but I don't care. Did I mention I blew up a ton of cool stuff in it? I also decided that I was going to keep this a secret and make it a surprise, which was REALLY hard to do because I REALLY loved writing this book. And I was REALLY excited to see what my daughter thought.

And then, sometime in December, as I was patting myself on the back for being THE BEST MOM EVER, I had a horrible realization. I had another child who would be really hurt if I didn't write HER a book for Christmas. Thus turning me into the worst mom who ever walked the planet and would cause my child years of heartache and therapy to get over the fact that I clearly liked her sister better because I wrote her sister a book and not her. Crap. So I wrote ANOTHER book.

Yes, friends, once my big December work project was finished, I wrote another book. For my 9 year old princess. I call it, "Mommy needs her head examined." Fortunately, I could get away with writing a shorter book with a less complex plot. I think this would fall into the middle grade category, except that I may have pushed that line a bit. But hey, the point is, I wrote a book for my other kid, and finished it on Christmas Eve at 11:54 p.m., which means that I SAVED Christmas. Or at least I saved myself from the guilt trip I would have been given for the rest of my life for writing a book for one kid and not the other.

Sadly, the second book is not as good as the first. I am not in love with it. It is, after all, a rough draft, but this kid, bless her little heart, is yet old enough to understand. She just thinks that having mommy write her a book is the coolest thing ever, and that her mommy is awesome. Yay me.

The kids opened their presents, and were not as excited as I hoped they'd be. But they were still happy, and Cowgirl, who was sick, spent the day reading my book. She finished it already and liked it. She did not say it was THE BEST BOOK EVER, which makes me sad. Clearly my children do not think I am as brilliant as I think I am. Oh, wait. No kid thinks that of their mom, so we're still good.

So there you have it. My Super Duper Top Secret Writing Project. Two books in less than two months. One that was totally awesome (as far as I am concerned), and one that was not so much (but the recipient thinks it is).

Which means I'm taking a tiny little writing vacation until I hear back from my editors. Or not. Maybe I should write a book for my dog next...

Lesson in Writing Productivity

This is my (I think) 8th year of doing and finishing NaNoWriMo. I ended with just over 62,000 words, plus I also wrote a proposal and sample chapters that didn't get counted in this number. Some of my friends get freaked out over those numbers. I will say that this has been my most productive word count writing month ever- I probably wrote somewhere around 90K.

I'm not saying this to brag on how well I did. Honestly, I think a lot of it comes from knowing myself, my process, and accepting it. I wanted to share some of what I learned because I hope it will help some others figure out their process as well. The key, in my opinion, is accepting and following your own process. We all work differently. So take a look at what worked for me and see if you can apply it to your own process.

I do work full-time. I've been telling myself it's part time, but I finally accepted the writing on my timesheet, and so I am admitting my full-time status. :) So how do I write that much AND work full time?

1. I recognize and respond to my productive hours. If I sit down to write at 9 a.m., I'll have maybe 1K done by noon. If I sit down to write at 9 p.m., I'll have 1K by 9:30. Therefore, I only write during my productive hours. This does mean, with a full time job and a family, that I went to bed later than I wanted to and I have been really tired this month. But with an active family and a husband who worked 60 hour weeks in November, plus a major work event, I didn't have a choice to put off other responsibilities to write. I wrote when I could, and I made it as productive as possible.

2. I recognize and respond to other productivity cues. I can't work with any background noise or the TV. I mean, I can, but if I have the TV on to catch up on my favorite show while I'm writing, I'm lucky to get a page written. With the TV off, I can write 1K in the time it takes to watch a show. So I made a choice to let the DVR record my shows, and when I have time, I catch up on them. I also recognized what an easy distraction the Internet is. Even though I told myself, "I'll look this up real quick," it ended up sucking a lot of my time for writing. So... I found times and places to write with no Internet access. My best writing days were in a coffee shop with no Internet access and in a car as a passenger on our Thanksgiving trip.

3. I accept my choices. It's easy for all of us to say, "I have no time." But when you look at ways you waste time, then you can examine what you could be doing instead. So when I felt like reading a book instead of writing, I was conscious of that being my choice and reminding myself that I DID have time to write, but I was choosing something else. I didn't do a lot of things I wanted to do this month, but I accepted it as MY CHOICE. By owning my choices, I felt a lot better about writing and taking the time to do the things I needed to do and also taking the time to do things I wanted to do. I did make choices to spend time not writing, but I accepted that as my choice, and I didn't feel guilty. Personally, I think there is a lot less guilt whether you write or don't write, when you accept the choices you make in that direction.

4. I accepted it as a fun "want to" instead of a "have to." I never go into NaNoWriMo with a lot of pressure. This year, I had a plan to write a book that is completely not in my genre and I haven't even decided if I'm going to try to get it published. I broke a ton of rules and had a lot of fun. I chose to see this book as a "play" book, to experiment and explore. Yes, I kind of had that luxury because all of my writing deadlines have been met. But I think sometimes we approach our writing with a lot of pressure and an idea of the rules and a list of everything we have to accomplish and I think that stifles our creativity. Every once and a while, I think it's good for our brains to have a break from that pressure and just let it go crazy.  My book is kind of crazy. But I'm really pleased with it, and I'm proud of what I did.

5. I nurtured my creative spirit. Remember that accepting my choices bit? Well, this month, I did a lot of art journaling. I really did not plan my time well at the start of this month. I joined three art challenges, a fitness challenge, NaNoWriMo, and had my usually busy life. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I did not fully complete my fitness or art challenges.) Some days, I ignored my art challenges to write. Some days, I ignored writing to do art. Some days, I did both. I remember from my time doing The Artist's Way that Julia Cameron suggests having artist dates with yourself. One day, when I was struggling with the writing, I closed my computer and went to the art museum. I came home to free flowing words and felt capable of handling what was a tough scene. I am learning that when I take time to nurture my creative spirit by playing with stuff in my art journal or going to the museum, or doing something creative OTHER than writing, my writing flows faster and better. If I art journaled and wrote in the same day, I averaged about 2k in an hour. If I only wrote that day, I averaged 1K an hour. To me, those numbers are significant, and it tells me that allowing myself creative freedom in another arena makes me more creative in general.

So that's how I got it done. It wasn't pretty at times, and please don't come to my house anytime soon or you will see the things I chose not to do so I could write, but if I could go back and choose how I spent my time differently, I wouldn't. I think I learned a lot this month and I'm excited to apply it to future months.

How did your writing go? Do you have any productivity tips that make your writing go faster?

 

What I learned from NaNoWriMo this year

**edited to add totals and NaNo button**

Sooo... it's over now. I'm officially at 59,932 words. The book I'm working on needs to be 80,000 words so I still have some work to do. Actually I have a lot to do.

As I just mentioned to my CP, this is absolutely the sloppiest first draft I've ever written. She offered to help me on the places I'm stuck, and I'm too embarrassed to show it to her. That's how bad it is.

Last year, my NaNo book was a book God challenged me to write because it was something I was afraid to write. This year, I'm not so sure what it is. Maybe it's to learn about accepting my imperfections and just going with the flow. I thought I did that okay, but wow... talk about your writing crap.

So far, here's what I learned from this year's experience:

1. My writing process is yet again evolving. I am a serious pantser. Usually, starting a new book from scratch at the beginning of a month is not a problem for me. However, my last book, I used a lot of the prewriting techniques from the book From the Inside Out by Susan May Warren and Rachel Hauck. I learned a lot from that process and found that I was more confident writing it. On my NaNo book, I did not do any prewriting. I found that this was the hardest book I've ever written, mostly because I didn't know a lot about my characters and story. I realized that while I still don't feel like my process involves a lot of pre-plotting, I do need to take time beforehand to figure out my characters, their goals, and their motivations.

2. Save, save, save!! I lost somewhere between 20-30 pages because my computer crashed and I hadn't saved my work. I'd been relying on autosave, and I could not recover what had been lost.

3. Friends make the work go quicker (and more fun!). I got together for writing days with friends on a couple of occasions, and my word count on those days was higher than any other day. Part of it was the inspiration of having other creative folks with tapping keys around me, and part of it was the accountability. I knew that I couldn't slack off and mess around when we were together.

4. I LOVE my alphasmart!! I've also learned how easily distracted I am. When I'm working on my alphasmart, I can't obsessively check my email, play on Facebook, surf the web for "research," see what everyone is doing on Twitter, and check on work stuff that I just checked on ten minutes ago.

5. I work better on a schedule. My most successful writing days happened when I had a schedule for myself. When I set certain hours for working, certain hours for writing, certain hours for family, etc. and forced myself to stop when time was up and move on to the next task, I got a lot more done on all tasks. Though I am good at multitasking, my best work comes from focus.

Given these lessons, I feel like I've got a lot of things I can use moving forward. And even though my book is crappy and not even close to being done yet, I do feel like I've got a good framework. My goal is to have it finished by the end of the year.

For those who did NaNo this year... what did you learn from it?

All I have to say

I know, I totally rock. Ending word count: 57,674

I should also mention, I didn't start on this book until about mid-month. El agento needed me to add to my word count on my other book, so I worked on that for a good part of the month. I added a total of 35,000 words to that one, but I did some of that in October, so I'm estimating that I did about 20,000 of it in November.

Which means, I wrote pretty darn near 80,000 words in one month. I'm so jazzed for myself. Henceforth, please address me as Madame Rockstar.

Okay, maybe not. I should point out that my NaNo book is not well plotted or researched, so I'll probably spend the next month or so fixing it. But first, I need to go back through the book I'm sending to el agento. It's due for the Critters to shred, I'll fix it, and once that's sent, I'll work on fixing the NaNo book.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with my progress. I even got to kill someone and blow something up in this book, so a good time was had by all. Love it when that happens.

Eating the elephant one bite at a time

Which is exactly how you write a book. Even if it's that foul tasting Nano elephant. There ain't enough ketchup in the world to make it taste good.

I'm bummed because I'm pretty far from the goal at this point. Only 17K words. But you know, it's 17K more than I had at the beginning of the month. And I still have time. It's not over until the fat lady sings.

So how do you face such a grotesque challenge of writing an impossible number of words? One word at a time. One sentence at a time. One page at a time. And even when you're dead tired, and it's super late, and you really don't want to write, you open up that document and put down a word. Then two. Then three. Before you know it, you have a whole sentence. And then a paragraph. And then a page. Which is how I got in five pages.

The good news is my class took their final tonight. The bad news is it's going to be a pain to grade it all. The other good news is that I don't have to teach again for another ten days. The final ten days of the challenge. :) I'm not cooking Thanksgiving, I have no pressing engagements, so I might maybe be able to actually *gasp* have some time to myself.

Which is probably just an invitation for the universe to explode, but until it does, I'm going to live in blissful anticipation of having a few moments that others don't have a claim on. And maybe kill a few drug dealers. Tee Hee.

Killing people is such HARD work

I am still working on the suckage referred to as my Nano book. I should change my word counters on the blog, since they're way outdated, but I don't remember how. And I'm too lazy to figure it out. I did head out to the Mother Ship last night and got about ten pages written. I'd have done more, except I ran into a guy from college who I usually run into, say hi, and that's that, but last night, he decided he needed to take a trip down memory lane. Ah well, such is life. It's ten more pages than what I had before.

Trying to get some done tonight, and I'm starting to get irritated because I'm ready to just blow up the bad guys already. The one bad guy just makes my skin crawl. I've also realized just how much I need to research. OH! I just realized who would know the answers to my questions. I love having smart writer friends who don't think I'm weird when I ask my questions. Anyway, I always thought that killing off a few bad guys would be really easy. Um, not so much. Because you have to make sure the readers are okay with them dying, and that all the other characters are sympathetic, and blah blah blah.

I'm also irritated because once again, my CPs thought my hero was um, yucky. How is it that I can think this man is soooo freaking awesome and hot and tormented and sensitive and all things a hero in the making should be and they think he's a total loser? Am I just attracted to losers? And I'm sorta scared, because as I write this Nano book, with a heroine who, by today's standards, is a loser, I worry-do I have a hope of bringing out all the things I love about her on to the page so that my readers fall in love with her and want her to win just as badly as I do?

I was talking to Joni about it today, and she got excited because she could tell how passionate I am about this story and how much the Lord is revealing to me. As I told her, I'm not so sure about the market for this book. Do you know how much it sucks to be familiar with the market, to know what's selling, and to realize that the book you're writing does not fit into that category at the moment? But I just feel like God is taking me on this crazy journey for a reason and there's something He wants to reveal to me through this story.

Is it weird that I talk about God working through me on a book and yet I also am killing people in the same book? More to the point, I'm blowing them up. I honestly thought I was only a chapter away. But nooooo.... all the other stuff has to get dealt with before we can blow them up. I still have to figure out how to get all the baddies in there at once. And I don't want to kill off Tony, but I think I have to. It's nice to have a martyr in an allegorical book, doncha think?